A lonely frozen corpse tumbled end-over-end, silhouetted against the endless backdrop of stars. Occasionally, the equipment or jewelry still worn by the corpse would refract a bit of light, but no one would ever see this body again until, eons hence, its orbit decayed into the nearby sun and returned what little matter it actually contains to the endless fusion process.
Some distance away, in a small space station, a large Caldari man leaned forward across his desk chair, hangs his head, and sighed heavily. A faintly acrid odor wafted through the room: the stench of dying circuits and burned-out electronics.
And somewhere below deck, a substantially shorter man lay sprawled across the floor. Anyone else in the room would have had a hard time seeing the motionless figure, though, with the dust and smoke and occasionally arcing electricity. Several uniformed guards lay slumped nearby, and while all of them still had faint vital signs, nobody had come to check on them. From the looks of things, nobody would.
Several hours earlier
The shuttle pulled up close to the station, its pilot docking with care and precision. Observers might have noticed that it didn’t stay docked long, however, and with good reason. One passenger disembarked with her luggage and a small amount of equipment, and then the shuttle took off again into the eternal night of space. Ansgar Station provided decent safety, but shuttles made a profit by always moving from one place to another.
Not so for this passenger. Several staff members met her at the docking bay and took charge of what few belongings she had brought along, escorting her to a rather plush suite of her own. Lushly carpeted and appointed, her suite even had a view out onto the moon which the station orbited. Only the occasional hiss of the environmental controls or a subdued whirr from the security systems disturbed the otherwise perfect silence. The newly-arrived visitor seated herself at the comm console and accessed her messages: a few from the university where she worked, and she easily answered those. No particularly personal messages, though she didn’t really notice this as that was the way it usually went. One needs personal friends to get personal messages, and she seemed to lack those lately.
A refreshment center sat unobtrusively in one corner of her suite and she rummaged through it quietly. While she’d eaten on the shuttle ride, she still didn’t quite have her nerves under control and sought solace and courage in her refreshments. The woman stepped in front of a mirror and examined herself closely, holding her drink listlessly in one hand. Short-cropped white hair, fashionably translucent clothing with strategic opacity that in fact concealed little, and silvered makeup that reflected the social status of a senior government bureaucrat. “Avelle,” she murmured to herself, “this is as good as it will get.” She still fussed a few more moments with her hair before completing her drink.
Her door chimed softly and a concierge announced a visitor: Joron Darkdust. She regarded the man as he strode into the room with an air of confidence. A bulky, imposing male, he had an unpleasant-looking scar over his right eye and the bearing of a man who didn’t lack for faith in his own abilities. He wore a bit of stubble on his chin and a military-esque haircut, though the rabbit-skull tattoos on his left arm indicated that the organizations for which he’d fought certainly didn’t have government backing.
He grinned broadly at her with a lascivious wink. “Avelle Lournache, good to see ya. Just like always.” They exchanged a few more pleasantries about her flight out to the station before he clasped his hands behind his back and peered more closely at her. “Now, you’re going to get us that university backing, that’s right?”
She smirked faintly at him with just a hint of demurral. “We’ll need to talk about that. Your company’s owner asked me to do it as a personal favor for her, but she hasn’t exactly given me everything I want yet. So we’ll see.” She licked her lips slightly as she explained this to him.
He frowned slightly and shook his massive head. “She’s out of the sector at the moment. I’ll see what I can do about getting you two in touch, though. I’d really like to see us get out of this low-sec hellhole and closer to civilization.” Joron paused and winked at her. “Lots more fun in the Federation, so I hear.”
Avelle pretended to laugh. “I’m sure that’s true. Now about reviewing those project files…”
“Oh, yeah, we can do that. I’ve got you a keycard and access to a research lab with a console just down this corridor, all set up for you. Shall we?” Joron held out his arm for her to take. Avelle simply looked at him for a moment, then walked past him to the door. “Perhaps you can just have your aide show me the lab?”
Joron worked his jaw in embarrassed silence for a moment, then nodded at the staffer standing outside. As the two women left the area, he rubbed his jaw thoughtfully and mused to himself. After a few moments, he stepped out of the living suite and made his way back to his office and his own console. As the chief security officer for Ansgar Station, he had access to essentially every bit of data that came into the facility or left it. He also had ensured that nearly every square meter of the station itself had proper security surveillance, and in this case “proper” meant “accessible to him”. So he brought up a few displays, including a video / audio feed of Avelle’s temporary office and a network traffic monitor, as well as firing off several requests for additional background data.
In her own office, Avelle rubbed her arm nervously for a moment before poking gingerly at the console. She observed that the equipment here appeared several generations out of date; perhaps they actually did need new facilities. That Joron character certainly rubbed her the wrong way, though. Avelle knew his type: stereotypical “mercenary man” who believed any woman just couldn’t wait to fall onto her back for him. Capsuleers, interstellar pilots who interfaced directly into their ships via a Jovian “capsule” or “pod”, often had a special brand of arrogance that came from riches and abilities beyond the comprehension of most inhabitants of the cluster, not to mention their functional immortality.
Avelle looked about furtively, then swiped a keycard through a reader and slipped through the unmarked door it protected. Databanks lined the walls of the room and parallel workbenches filled much of its center. She set down a briefcase next to a console, then swiped the keycard again through a reader attached to the console and entered a code.
The Gallente woman worked quickly, knowing she’d not have much time before the systems alerted the staff to her actions. She inserted a small datacard, then issued the commands to copy and wipe as many of the data files as she could. Rather than take the time to sift through them for just the data she wanted, she grabbed as much research data as she could in the short time she’d allotted herself. No attempt whatsoever to hide her tracks from later investigation: the electronic equivalent of smash and grab.
Still, she’d engrossed herself so deeply in the task at hand that she didn’t notice when several console lights blinked from green to orange. The booming laugh that echoed from the speakers in the room, though, drew her quickly from her reverie, her heart suddenly racing with the knowledge she’d been caught.
“Mon ami, you must have known we’d watch you extra closely. I didn’t get old by accident, and Casiella hired me just in case of this sort of treachery.” She looked around the room for the camera drones that must have given her away, but saw nothing.
The voice continued. “It’s a damn shame, you know. We really thought you’d bought into the project.” He sighed heavily and paused for a beat. “We were gonna change the cluster, you know. Still will. Don’t you think we’ve got backups of that research data.”
In a flash, she grabbed at the keycard and started to grab at her briefcase, when a spotlight came on it directly. He chuckled, then snapped harshly at her. “Don’t touch that. I have a security team on their way; don’t make this more difficult than you already have.”
She looked up again, searching out the cameras to look him in the eye, as it were. Finding nothing, she spoke hoarsely. “We learned this lesson before, you ass. This sort of thing led to the rogue drones and all the lives that they’ve taken.”
Silence for a moment, then a response: “None of that matters now. Casiella pays me to keep this station safe, and that means I do what everybody knows has to get done but don’t want to do themselves. No return trip for you, Avelle.”
She swallowed hard, realizing what he intended (if not how). Her already-raspy voice cracked as she started to plead with them. “We- we can talk about this. No harm done, as you said…”
“SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!” The male voice took a deep breath, then continued. “You’re gonna make me shoot your ass, you know that?”
Before she could respond, she heard the heavy thud of boots in the hallway and precise orders shouted by men with professionalism but no anger. The door slid open, revealing a uniformed squad protecting a short, squat Caldari man in a lab coat with a thick cable conduit wired directly into his right temple and leading to a bulky piece of electronic equipment strapped to his chest. Oddly, his eyes were closed, but then he opened them smoothly and quickly. The effect seemed more that of a machine powering up than of a surprised man. He spoke in short, clipped, metallic tones, then raised one eyebrow. He pointed at her, but his eyes reflected no malice. “Avelle Lournache. University of Caille at Bille. Black Eagle.”
Mercenaries pushed past him and made their way across the lab toward her. Taking a deep breath, she dove towards the briefcase. Rifle shots rang out and found their mark, but too late. Avelle pressed a button on the briefcase.
The equipment around her suddenly went dark, the rifles stopped firing, and the man in the lab coat slumped to the floor, his eyes rolled back in his head. Coughing up blood, she smiled at the mercenaries who now held their helmeted heads in both heads and cried out in pain. “EMP grenade. I win.”
A dark oath could be heard down echoing down the corridors. Several ceiling vents hissed quietly and opened, and she looked up to see what would happen. The hiss turned to a roar as the air began to rush out of the room, vented directly into the vacuum of space.
She gripped the console and gasped for air, but to no avail: the perforations in her lungs and the screaming roar of the vented atmosphere combined to ensure she spent her last moments in frantic despair, before finally losing her grip and feeling her body ripped away and out of the station.
A lonely frozen corpse tumbled end-over-end, silhouetted against the endless backdrop of stars.
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